Developing Adapters for SAP HANA Cloud Integration Using the Adapter Development Kit

See how to use the Adapter Development Kit (ADK) to develop new adapters for SAP HANA Cloud Integration (SAP HCI). You apply the ADK to build a connector to content management systems adhering to the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard. You can then use the new adapter to move documents from and to different folders of the publicly available Alfresco CMIS server.

Learning Objectives

By reading this article you will:

Learn how to prepare yourself for adapter development by installing the Adapter Development Kit (ADK) inside Eclipse

Know how to apply the ADK for generating wrapper code around an already existing Apache Camel component

Understand what the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard is all about and how to connect and access documents on the publicly available Alfresco CMIS server using the newly developed adapter

Understand the overall adapter development life cycle so that you can easily apply this knowledge to other connectivity needs

Key Concept

Transferring documents between enterprise content management systems is a frequent task in real-life integration scenarios. So far, however, different vendors have come up with their own proprietary Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for accessing their respective systems. Fortunately, in May 2010, content management system vendors agreed upon a harmonizing standard, the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard. It allows for open interoperability between content management systems of different vendors across the Internet. They use web protocols to communicate with each other. The standard is under the control of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured

SAP HANA Cloud Integration (SAP HCI) is SAP’s integration solution for connecting to a multitude of systems, in the cloud and on premise. It comes with a number of adapters that allow communication with other systems on different levels, including different technologies, security standards, and application-specific requirements.

Typical examples are adapters connecting to Twitter, Ariba, and SuccessFactors applications, or adapters connecting via protocols such as HTTP, Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), IDoc, Open Data Protocol (OData), or Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP). However, SAP will never be able to cover the huge variety and combinations of applications, protocols, security, and versions solely on its own. This gives customers and partners the unique opportunity to fill those gaps by providing their own adapters.

That brings us to the question of how you develop adapters for SAP HCI. That is what we cover in this article. We show how to develop and add a new Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) adapter to the palette of existing SAP HCI adapters.

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Holger Kunitz

Holger Kunitz is a product expert and member of the product management team for SAP HANA Cloud Integration and SAP Process Orchestration, SAP’s integration products for cloud and on-premise deployment. Holger has worked on integration topics at SAP for more than 20 years. Previous assignments include his work at SAP Research in the Internet-of-Things space and for SAP’s Regional Implementation Group with a special focus on SAP Process Integration.

Dr. Volker Stiehl

Prof. Dr. Volker Stiehl studied computer science at the Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. After 12 years as a developer and senior system architect at Siemens, he joined SAP in 2004. As chief product expert, Volker was responsible for the success of the products SAP Process Orchestration, SAP Process Integration, and SAP HANA Cloud Integration (now SAP HANA Cloud Platform, integration service). He left SAP in 2016 and accepted a position as professor at the Ingolstadt Technical University of Applied Sciences where he is currently teaching business information systems. In September 2011, Volker received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Technology Darmstadt. His thesis was on the systematic design and implementation of applications using BPMN. Volker is also the author of Process-Driven Applications with BPMN as well as the co-author of SAP HANA Cloud Integration and a regular speaker at various national and international conferences.